I was a tour guide in college, and no, we didn’t take people into dorms, classrooms, or dining halls. We did go into an architecturally impressive chapel and an auditorium.
I can understand the disappointment of someone expecting more of an inside look, but think of it from the school’s perspective. We had multiple tours running every day. Most groups had upwards of twenty people. Bringing hordes of people into frequently used campus buildings multiple times a day would be beyond distracting, and unfair to members of the community. That’s why the two buildings we did go to were ones that weren’t being heavily used on a day to day basis. Yes, I suppose we could have changed the tour up on non-class days, but frankly, while I went to college on a lovely campus, most of the classrooms were, well, classrooms.
What the tour does is provide a current student to give a little bit of campus history, provide some information on opportunities the school offers and the guide’s experiences of being a student there, and answer questions. Doing so while walking around the campus and pointing out particular buildings also gives prospective students some sense of the look and feel of the place, and makes for a more engaging experience. But it isn’t intended to give a literal “inside look” to all aspects of university life.
@apprenticeprof and my experience is that there are schools that do manage to do this (the 7 tours I went on with my DS) and best I can tell it is not negatively impacting the student body. So it was just a surprise to me that I had such a consistent touring experience with my DS that was vastly different from this first tour with my DD.
What @apprenticeprof said, and yes there’s a supply/demand issue. Everybody and their grandmother wants to tour Harvard (for example), even if they don’t have a prospective student. Supporting the number of people who want to go into all the buildings would make campus life unbearable for the actual students. But there are workarounds if your interest is serious and what the buildings look like from the inside is an important part of your decisionmaking.
We’ve only done the official tour for some large public schools - some showed us the dorms, others didn’t. They may look different on the outside, but on the inside they all looked like dorms. Not much to be gleaned from them. One went through a couple of libraries, but the rest didn’t. I felt like I was invading the students space in those. None of the tours went in a dining hall. Only one (Cal Poly) went through some engineering labs and that was actually very good. On admitted student days we went into some classrooms, but they looked like generic classrooms to me.
We always got much more of a school’s vibe by walking all around the campus (which was part of the tours), having a bite to eat either in the student center or someplace just off campus, walking the area surrounding the campus, and just observing the students going to and from class. Our expectations of campus tours are what @apprenticeprof described and that was good enough for us.
I give credit to the majority of LACs for doing very nice tours showing a lot of the campuses. Granted, they don’t have the same volume of visitors given their smaller size. At the majority of LACs, you will see libraries, dining halls, dorms and dorm rooms, classrooms, gyms, etc.
Harvard’s was the biggest waste of time IMO. It was basically a brief tour of the campus buildings - outside only and not very informative. We did not see the inside of anything except for the room where they held the information session. We were not impressed. I would think that they would have actual tours that were meaningful for students who had the stats to at least humor the idea of attending Harvard - if they had a minimum cut off for test scores or GPA or something – it felt like a huge waste of time and they treated us all like nosy tourists who just wanted a peek at the esteemed campus.
We felt Princeton, Penn, and Cornell all did a much better job at treating the families on the tour with some respect - as paying customers that may be choosing their institution. I know that Harvard could care less that we felt this way - but it did make an impression (and not a good one).
Columbia was like that. We started in an auditorium for an info session, but the tour was completely outdoors. I remember being disappointed because we had driven 4 hours to get there, and we got to see very little, and it was at the top of my daughter’s list. It was February and very cold, and it was jammed with people, so I remember we actually left early because it was too cold to be standing outside for so long, although you’d think all the talking “hot air,” would have counted for something.
I would have loved a couple of ‘short tours’ (what we call the tour at Coors; short tour is right to the tasting room). At some of the smaller schools, we saw every dorm room, fountain, library book, classroom, and cafeteria. I can’t remember any that impressed me so much that the school shot to the top of a list. I learned that I needed to have an escape from some tours or do a self tour because I just couldn’t look at one more dorm room. To me, libraries are libraries and dorms are dorms.
I don’t know we saw some dorms where they crammed in so many people in such a small space it was a turn off. Or course, these were not on official tours. We actually got to see a lot more of several campuses with our own “private” tours. My H is a HS teacher so he would contact some former student who was willing to meet up with us. I remember at one school we had about 7 or 8 students join us for lunch.
For us the physical layout and location was the most important thing we wanted to learn from tours. Also high up was what the students looked like (how did they dress, etc.) We also liked to see the library and at least one dining hall. Before or after the tour we walked around the campus, poked our heads into various buildings, stopped in a campus coffee shop to eavesdrop. We just wanted to get the sound, smell, appearance of the campus and people.
We dubbed the VMI tour “the 10-foot tour”. We started out in the museum area, left the building and basically walked across the road to peek at the barracks (from the outside), pointed at a few buildings, and gave some history. She did answer any questions we had, but as far as a tour goes it was really limited. I know that some just tour as a site seeing stop but our tour was made up of 4 prospective students their families.
I might add that for our oldest, we made no tours in advance of applications. AFTER he was admitted, he did an overnight for “accepted students’ day” at one place. He also visited another, where we toured, attended 2 classes, and stayed overnight. He also met with a professor there (arranged through a friend of mine). So once things became really focused, and once the student is at the final decision stage, it may be worthwhile and possible to do focused visits. Our son had no interest in making pre-application visits, because he was very busy and in any case had seen many college campuses over the years.
My daughter is at Bates and our tour only visited the chapel and a dorm. And it was the worst dorm, one of the horrible cinder block ones, when they could have shown much nicer dorms. This was just a few days before students returned to campus. We visited Brown and did go in a lecture hall. And at JHU we went in many buildings because it was 7 degrees that morning. At Tufts we went in the theater and the dining hall. I think it might just depend on the day you visit, the guide, and how many questions are being asked.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised how many times we’ve been looking at a map while walking around a campus and a student has asked us if we need any help. These were at big (20K undergrads) campuses, so it could have been much more impersonal.
My D’s sophomore year in college, she lived in a really nice dorm room on the ground floor next to the entrance. She and her roommate were also neat freaks. They had several friends who worked in Admissions as tour guides, and they were frequently asked ahead of time if they would be available to show their dorm room during specific tours. Tour guides don’t have keys to rooms. They didn’t mind their room being shown, but they only consented when it was convenient to their schedule.
It varies by school, sometimes due to walking distance. Our dorm tours included some fairly selective schools - Amherst, Carnegie Mellon, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd (the ugliest dorms we ever saw…and the “model” was lived in, not pristine demo room like some place… but DS loved it). Some of our dorm walks showed rooms, some did not.
“It varies by school, sometimes due to walking distance. Our dorm tours included some fairly selective schools - Amherst, Carnegie Mellon, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd”
Yes, and it makes schools who say they CAN’T show a dorm because of “privacy” seem very silly. There are many schools who manage to show dorms off during tours without a problem. From smallish schools like Rice to Big State U’s like Iowa and Pitt (disgusting dorm) How in the world do they manage it?